At DrupalCon New Orleans, Dries Buytaert mentioned component-based theming as a potential future initiative for Drupal. This idea had been discussed at MidCamp, and further hashed out at DrupalCon. Some initial efforts have been made to prototype how we could get started with real component-based markup in Drupal theming.

Currently, Drupal's theme system consists primarily of templates that are tightly tied to Drupal's data structures. While much of front-end development revolves around design components—breaking a design into smaller and smaller chunks—it can often take several template overrides to create the markup for one component. That causes difficulties in integrating Drupal with style guides or pattern libraries based around components, such as Pattern Lab or KSSNode. Markup often needs to be duplicated, once in Drupal's templates, and again in the templates that drive a style guide.

Moving Drupal to a theme system based around components could have numerous benefits, from improving style guide integration to making it easier for site builders to build sites outside-in to making it easier to reuse templates both server-side and client-side.

In this session we'll discuss why component-based theming matters, the current state of this discussion, and how you can help take Drupal's theme system to Chunk-y Town.